James Carl Nelson - The York Patrol

Maps by Springer Cartographics LLC 2020

T hick mist clung to the wet brush, grass, and mud across the front that morning, covering the ground like soggy cotton as men woke and stirred and prepared themselves for another day of slogging, another day of battle, from the Bois de Consenvoye along the Meuse River to the village of St. tienne, west of the Argonne Forest and east of Reims on the high ground of Champagne.

One of them was Pvt. Henry G. Costin, of Company H, 115th Infantry Regiment, Twenty-Ninth Division. When the advance of his platoon though the woods was held up by intense enemy fire, Costin, just twenty years old, gathered his automatic-rifle team and led it forward through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire. Costins brave act would lead to the surrender of some one hundred Germans, plus several machine guns. But he himself would not live out the rest of October 8, 1918.

Near St. tienne, below the Aisne River and at the plain above Blanc Mont, taken in early October by the Second Division, Sgt. Samuel M. Sampler and Cpl. Harold L. Turner, both with the Second Battalion, 142nd Infantry Regiment, Thirty-Sixth Division, also advanced with their companies that morning, only to be stopped by savage German fire. Sampler, twenty-three, would later remember that of the 178 men of his company who went over the top that morning, more than one hundred were killed or wounded within minutes. The survivors dug in, while Lt. Emil Hornke rose to scout out the German line. He fell almost immediately, a bullet through his heart.

Sampler then rose, grabbed three German hand grenades that he had picked up during the advance, and stepped out and rushed toward the machine gun that had caused such damage. His first two grenades missed the nest. The last found its mark, killing two gunners. Twenty-eight others quickly surrendered to him.

Twenty-year-old Harold Turner, not far away, was also advancing under intense fire. The second-in-command of his platoon, he encouraged his men and kept them moving until only four of his original fifty-odd men were unharmed. As they went to ground, Turner noticed the German gun nest had shifted its sights for a moment, and he raced forward across twenty-five yards over open ground, at fixed bayonet. In a moment, fifty surprised, war-hardened Germans surrendered themselves and four machine guns to Turner.

Back in the Bois de Consenvoye, another Twenty-Ninth Division American hero was being made. Lt. Patrick Regan, thirty-six, led his platoon of the 115th Infantry Regiment forward into the fray, where they, like almost everyone along the line that day, were stymied by hot machine-gun fire.

With an automatic-rifle team of three, the squad made a full-frontal assault on the German machine-gun nest that was holding up the advance. Two of his men fell dead, while Regan and the other soldier were severely wounded. Undeterred, Regan pulled out his empty pistol and dashed forward right into the nest, and effected the surrender of forty Austrian soldiers and their four machine guns.

Regan, despite his wounds, continued to lead the remainder of his platoon that morning before being ordered back by his company commander.

Not far away, Sgt. Johannes S. Anderson and Company B of the 132nd Infantry Regiment, Thirty-Third Division, also faced murderous fire from the German machine guns and from their front and artillery farther ahead. The thirty-two-year-old Finnish immigrant hardly hesitated before he volunteered to reduce a gaggle of German gunners doing much of the damage.

Striking out alone, he came under severe and constant fire as he worked his way across open ground. Before long, Anderson single-handedly silenced the gun and captured it and twenty-three of the enemy.

There were other American heroes performing great deeds that day on the Meuse-Argonne front: Lt. James C. Dozier; Sgts. Gary Evans Foster, Earl D. Gregory, Thomas Lee Hall, and James E. Karnes; and Pvts. Clayton K. Slack and Calvin John Ward. Each would be awarded Medals of Honor for their exploits, two of themHenry Costin and Thomas Lee Hallposthumously. In all, thirteen M.O.H.s would be awarded for the days work.

Those mentioned above account for twelve of the medals.

The thirteenth would be awarded to the one man who would emerge from a ravine near Chatel-Chhry as the greatest single American hero of the Great War.

HIS NAME WAS Alvin Cullum York, late of Pall Mall, Tennessee, acting corporal with Company G, 328th Infantry Regiment, Eighty-Second Division.

Though Gen. John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, would single out another man, Lt. Sam Woodfill of the Fifth Division, as the A.E.F.s greatest soldierand Woodfill would certainly get his share of accolades for single-handedly killing more than twenty-five Germans near Cunel, in the central Argonnehis acclaim would be dwarfed by the attention paid to Alvin C. York.

In postwar lore, York would be celebrated as a one-man army for his exploits near Chatel-Chhry on October 8, 1918, where, it was said, he single-handedly killed two dozen Germans, captured 132 more, and nabbed thirty-five machine guns to boot. When he paraded them to the American line, the story went, one American officer exclaimed in wonder, York, I hear you captured the whole damn German army.

Magazine articles were written about York, and he was feted across the United States. Twenty-three years after the fact Sergeant York, a movie starring Gary Cooper in the title role, would flood movie screens around the country, further burnishing the man, the legend, and his remarkable bravery.

Released in the early fall of 1941, Sergeant York was a primo piece of propaganda for a nation that would find itself at war with Germany and Japan before the year was out, and it helped fuel enlistments and a nations pride in American uniqueness, American bravery.

Like myriad westerns that graced the silver screen for twenty-five years, the movie celebrated the image of a lone hero subduing the enemy in the name of progress and democracy. It celebrated the iconic American who took matters into his own hands and, without protest or whining, single-handedly faced the nations enemies and carried the day.

In fact, though, York was not alone that day.

He wasnt even in charge.

Seventeen American soldiers were sent to patrol behind the German lines on the morning of October 8, 1918. Only eleven came back alive. And only one returned a hero.

Wills. Donohue. Muzzi. Beardsley. Early. Konotski. Swanson. Cutting. Weiler. Sok. Johnson. Dymowski. Sacina. Wine. Savage. Wareing.

York.

This is the full story of the York Patrol, and of the seventeen men who encountered a superior force of Germans in the woods west of Chatel-Chhry, on the eastern edge of the Argonne Forest. Together, they subdued and captured much of that force, allowing the advance of the 328th Infantry Regiment to continue.

While taking nothing away from York and his exploits, the complete story will reveal exactly what happened that day, and track the actions not only of York but the actions of those other young doughboys who were there with him. It will also show how a deeply religious, onetime conscientious objectora barely literate backwoodsman from a remote Tennessee valleybecame, to some degree to his own dismay, an enduring national hero.